Alba receives GE delegates and briefs them about its Line 6 Expansion

Aluminium Bahrain (Alba), the Bahrain-based aluminium smelter, reports that mid of last week August 15, the company received a high-level delegation from General Electric (GE) Power. The delegation was led by the President and chief executive officer of GE Gas Power Systems (GPS) Chuck Nugent and comprised of top officials of the company.

Alba’s deputy chief executive officer Ali Al Baqali, chief marketing officer Khalid A Latif, chief power officer Amin Sultan, chief administration officer Waleed Tamimi along with other officials of Alba received the delegates from GE and briefed them about Alba’s historical background, its achievements and importance to Bahrain’s economy.

Al Baqali also briefed about the progress on Alba’s Power Expansion project to GE officials. He said, “Our flagship project, Line 6 Expansion Project, is under way especially as we have on-boarded the last batch of new recruits in June.”

He highlighted that Line 6 Expansion created around 500 permanent direct jobs in Alba and aimed to boost the downstream cluster by creating indirectly few thousand job opportunities.

With this new expansion, Alba’s total production capacity is expected to increase to 1.5 million metric tonnes per year making it the world’s largest single-site aluminium smelter.

Followed the briefing Chuck Nugent said, “We have a strong and long-term partnership with Alba, which has set a global first by deploying GE Power’s advanced H-Class turbine, the world’s largest and most efficient gas turbine for the first time in the region and in the aluminium smelting industry.”

He added that the H-class technology would help Alba increase its power capacity to support its smelter expansion and work alongside the team providing maintenance coverage onsite support, digital remote support and other efficiency measures.

“We are also committed to advancing Alba’s vision to become the world’s largest single-site smelter. We are progressing Power Station 5 to support Alba’s goal of First Hot Metal by January 1, 2019,” Nugent concluded.